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Question Regarding Incapacitation

for some reason I cannot post in the official questions forum so I am posting here hoping someone can possibly answer the question.

Imagine a Wild Card with 2 Levels of Fatigue and 3 Wounds.

They are hit by an effect that both damages them and fatigues them - what it is does not matter.

Which of the effects causes the Incapacitation? Wounds or Fatigue?

The reason for the question is because if it is Wounds, all that is needed is to heal the Wild Card one wound level and they are no longer incapacitated, whereas Fatigue is at the discretion of the Storyteller.

So yeah ... which is first? Or is it up to the Storyteller to select the order of occurrences.

Or are both in effect and thus both need to be "solved" before the situation is corrected.

Comment

They are hit by an effect that both damages them and fatigues them - what it is does not matter.

Which of the effects causes the Incapacitation? Wounds or Fatigue?

Both.
The Fatigue Incapacitation probably can't cause death (excluding specific sources, like suffocation) so it's a low-priority resolution.
Just go straight to the Incapacitation roll to see if the character was slain by the Wounds, and handle that normally. With a -2 to -5 penalty on those rolls, recovery is probably not a concern.
After you determine if the character is dead, bleeding to death, or going to survive, then you'll want to resolve the Incapacitation from Fatigue.

Or are both in effect and thus both need to be "solved" before the situation is corrected.

This one.
Assuming the character survives the deadly Wounds (and that's unlikely, as I noted above), healing can restore the wound based Incapacitation but does nothing for the Fatigue (unless it does). Until the Fatigue is restored enough to remove Incapacitated, the character can't take actions regardless of their Wound condition. There are a lot of possible corner cases, depending upon the source(s) of Fatigue and the recovery condition(s), but that would require knowledge that your example explicitly leaves out.

Aside: The only regularly occurring source of both Wounds and Fatigue is powers, specifically a damage dealing power augmented with the Fatigue power modifier. But the Fatigue power modifier can't cause Incapacitation. "What it is" really does matter.

I hope you find the above post useful. And not insulting, because I was trying to be helpful, not insulting; being a pedantic jerk, that isn't always clear.

2 likes

Comment

Incapacitation is a 'condition' caused when a character exceeds the limit on either their Wounds or Fatigue. If both tracks are exceeded, then both need to be dealt with individually before a character is no longer Incapacitated.

As others have mentioned, dealing with Wounds / Bleeding Out is going to be the immediate concern. With three Wounds and two levels of Fatigue, the character is making their Vigor roll at -5 (or -2 if they have Hard to Kill). Fatigue usually just "goes away" after a hour or a day (depending on source), so even if a character survives their Wounds, they're still likely to be down-and-out for a while. Only magic can speed up Fatigue recovery.